how will you spend the coming collapse?

"the decay of rome has been frequently ascribed to the translation of the seat of empire, but this history has already shown that the powers of government were divided rather than removed. constantinople was erected in the east, while the west was still possessed by a series of emperors who held their residence in italy and claimed their equal inheritance of legions and provinces. this dangerous novelty impaired the strength and fermented the vices of a double reign...a vain emulation of luxury, not of merit was introduced and supported between the degenerate successors of theodosius. extreme distress, which unites the virtues of a free people, embitters the factions of a declining monarchy. the hostile favorites of arcades and honorius betrayed the republic to its common enemies; and the byzantine court beheld with indifference, perhaps with pleasure, the disgrace of rome."
edward gibbon chapter XXXVIII of the history of the decline and fall of the roman empire.

yeah...i know comparisons with rome are trite and from a viewpoint of historiography an uncertain business...the past does not foretell the future...if it did we could have avoided this debacle and flushed the whores into the potomac with the rest of the turds...however, a bit of judicious editing...the insertion of the words tea party, democrats, republicans, chinese, etc. and you could have an approximation of what's up in the divided halls of the hallowed national bagnio...the social darwinists in the republican party passed the cobbled together boehner vision that came of contentious disagreement...but the plurality was a joke and a sizable number of the stalwarts jumped ship to vote against their crypto-fascist brothers in the lower whore house...there are multiple faultlines in evidence and that does not bode well for a fix...there are those on each side which would behold with 'Indifference"or "perhaps with pleasure" the failure of the other...i entertain a bipartisan loathing for the creeps and wouldn't mind seeing them all fail if i and those in my precarious social strata ( read people with jobs) wouldn't be the immediate victims of that failure...then again...think of the stench we'd be leaving behind when the empire fails and we are forced to return to a culture of co-operation and mutual support rather than servicing the greed inherent in the capitalist ruling class...no more consumerist utopia...empty big-box stores and unused shipping containers as shelters for the homeless...advertizing neutralized...no more lame sit-coms...the death of celebrity...the return of the real...quick or long term a fix is not imminent ( of course since the whores are creatures of special interest and special interest are about what is going on NOW not later there NEVER will be a long term anything that emanates from the bordello ) anytime soon...the default deadline will come and go because all these "degenerates" have left is ideology and that bodes no good for the street...fuck these people.


7-31-2011 7:52 pm

okay i just watched obamaland announce thet there is a deal to avoid a default, raise the debt ceiling, allow us to "pay our bills", and to reduce the deficit "responsibly"...but i got no details...most of what i have read about the rejected proposals actually said they were deferring what and how much to cut to committees down the road...no doubt in closed door sessions and employing the same "responsibility" that engendered the mess in the first place...i smell political expedient because the street is pissed...the question is what will this really fix?

how about the failure option?

i just emailed a couple of the whores who purport to represent me in the national bagnio in whoretown on the potomac ( no i did not threaten them...i did point out that 1) they had to stand for re-election sometime, and 2) that the mood among the citizenry is growing increasingly ugly ) by now visclosky's robotic message interceptors have compressed the digital information in my screed and punted it off into the ethereal void of the internet's bottomless recycle bin...but fuck him...he is , after all, a politician and no more in touch with the mood of the street than donald trump or t boone pickens...if he was he would be beating on the door of cheney's bunker and claiming right of sanctuary by dint of being a fellow whore...they may all end up hunkered down in there before it's all over...taking turns flogging grover nordquist with rubber hoses while ruminating on where it all went wrong..stunned that bernanke and geithner could have been so wrong...they're economists after all and so know everything there is about an economy...they said so in their resumes...no-one form am ivy league school is ever wrong...right? their world view is a pile of smoking ashes and the chinese are ascendant...soon cheap statues of chairman mao will dot the landscape of the heartland and mandarin will be babbled in town halls and beer gardens everywhere...for those still boxed in by the exceptionalist thinking they picked up in high school civics ( the kiwanis club membership say...or perhaps the young republicans )the end of the american century will come as a heavy blow...the smart money is already invested in gold and the three gorges dam...the rest of us are screwed.

tonight is my fortieth high school class reunion and tomorrow they are having some monsterous abortion called "brickie fest"...i am going to a bar to see my son-in-law's band tonight and out to the garden on campus tomorrow...they will have to get on without me as best they can...relief all around

bankruptcy is no longer stigmatized

"without wider markets, firms using powered machinery would have either consumed themselves in a competitive frenzy or seen their technologies banned as a result of popular unrest...a sales pyramid developed. the early participants in a sales pyramid get rich because they receive commission on the goods they sell to people who they have persuaded to become dealers too; dealers who in turn receive commission from others they induce to join the pyramid as dealers later on, who themselves recruit and stock further dealers. and so it goes on, setting up a situation in which everyone in the pyramid can only fulfill their income aspirations if the pyramid does the impossible and expands indefinitely...it was the need for exclusive external markets to solve the problem of mass unemployment at home that led the european powers to scramble to assemble competing empires and to eventually confront each other in the first world war.
"where we went wrong" richard douthwaite

"short of support form their congressional members, house republican leaders on thursday called off a vote on their proposal to raise the debt ceiling. just minutes from a roll call vote on the plan pushed by speaker john boehner, republicans stunned the house by interrupting the debate and turning to routine matters while mr. boehner and his lieutenants tried to pressure reluctant conservatives into backing their plan....republicans had expressed confidence that they would round up enough recalcitrant conservatives to pass their plan, but they obviously miscalculated...officials said opponents had multiple misgivings about the measure, which senate democrats said they would reject as soon as it reached the senate desk."
n y times 7-29-2011

so all they are left with is stubborn ideology rather than the mental acuity and flexibility to begin to see that the industrial capitalist ponzi scheme engendered by a 250 year bubble of cheap energy is coming undone...behaving like spoiled children they are stamping their feet and calling one another names across the aisle...digging in their heels to support their versions of a status quo that has come badly unhinged and obviously oblivious to the aura of bonehead stupidity they are emanating across the country...teleological and exceptionalist thinking are what you get when you turn to ideolouges as representatives who have convinced the pea-brained that they have answers...we would seem to be up to our deaf ears in that...never one to believe that authority actually knew what the fuck it was talking about i am unsurprised that there is confusion government, even among those who purport to be on the same page...fear does weird things to people and conservatives are nothing if not fearful...especially of change...poor sods are doomed because life is nothing if not change...stasis is death so you have to accept change as inevitable and i, for one, support a complete and total default on any outstanding debts the country has, the proroguing of congress, the abandonment of the constitution, independent nationhood for texas, and the declaration of the fourth republic for anyone who thinks it's a good idea to still have politicians and their handlers around...your only salvation will be local...the whores are out of ideas...the fat is in the fire and the hog in in the tunnel...fuck these people...they never had much credibility to begin with...what miniscule portion is left will be squandered by next tuesday...american politics ( and politics in general for that matter ) are consequntialist in nature..problem is the interconnectedness of the economy is so complex that it is unknowable and unpredictable ( goodbye economics...you were always voodoo)...it will settle at one level or another once this all falls out...here's hoping the whores reap the consequences they deserve.

what has become of the "invisible hand"?

"the impasse over major elements of the agreement came as lawmakers said they were determined to make a new compromise public on sunday afternoon before the financial markets in asia opened to reassure investors there."
n y times 7-24-2011

free market my ass...poor adam would be in a fit of towering rage if he were here...incensed...apoplectic...let the bastard fail if that is what it needs to do...let the "invisible hand" of the "self-correcting market" do its work and end the empire as we know it...the whores are hypocrites...we know that...so are the ekonomists...kaptains of industry...and the elite greed-heads in the sub-basements and massage parlors of wall street..."too big to fail" is just a euphemism for upward redistribution of wealth and "free market" means free to plunder with little in the way of consequences...well...the zero sum game of a true economy is about to kick these fools in the nuts...i may suffer...but i will celebrate as well...learn to love the lake of fire and get local.


anders behring breivik and his "atrocious but necessary" defense is just another example of religion at work...the cleric and the executioner have been intimate from the beginning...fuck these people

fugitive to the whores: go pound sand

"for many house republicans the legislation was their best offer in the continuing standoff with president obama and congressional democrats."

"even before he has reached a sweeping budget and debt deal with mr.boehner, mr. obama is trying to sell his concession to congress democrats, many of whom fear a 'grand bargain' will undercut their party's ability in the 2012 campaign to use republican's support of deep cuts in medicare, medicaid, and social security against them."

n y times 7-22-2011

the willingness of whores form both wings of the ruling elite to shamelessly manipulate public opinion with emotional issues is an accepted fact of political life in the third republic...that it is a moribund as the french third republic is a fact of life that is becoming more apparent to its citizenry with every passing day...the creeps on wall street are in a psychotic state of mind as the desperately hope that the whores will find enough cash to save their sorry asses by bilking the taxpayer and dispossessing the elderly of promised entitlements that their taxes were supposed to fund...convinced one day that their hired hands in congress will do their bidding...terrified the next that there is no more to be had...a series of economic psychotic episodes as the dow jones roller-coasters through week after week...clearly the billions the whores have shoveled to their handlers are not enough to mollify their greed and fear...those shits will not rest until they have all the gold and diamonds they can lay their hands on ( the treasury is not printing ten dollar bills this year but they're printing hundreds like they're free...what's that say? hyper-inflation anyone? soon the currency will be useful only for tersive purposes...how , i wonder, will the hoarders digest gold? )...both side sin the "debate" are behaving like fools...one side purposefully delivering legislation it knows the other cannot accept so they can claim a lack of commitment to reigning in the debt and the other denying any sort of compromise so it can use the intransigence of the other as political leverage...meanwhile what's left of the economy continues to behave as erratically as its wall street doyens...the upshot as i see it is that there is no fix that is palatable to the elite...growth is over and they are stuck holding the bag for all those sunk costs in the current economic infrastructure...they are desperate to find a way out that does not exist and so are left to play at politics while anyone with an ounce of intellect is trying to figure out how best to weather the inevitable collapse...time to unplug the tv and reconnect with your neighbors...we are all going to need one another when the real post-industrial economy kicks in. bear that in mind as the foul slide into the surreal 2012 presidential campaign kicks off in earnest...no-one interested in the job is capable of dealing with the dilemmas...we will have to do it ourselves...adapting to local conditions...there's a toolkit for that ( even though it is a bit rusty...consigned to neglect as we were opiated with electronic media) it's called culture...check it out.


ALL THEY HAVE LEFT IS IDEOLOGY
7-23-2011 7:44 am

so boehner takes a powder and the recriminations fly...it's the party that cannot say yes versus the tax and spend heirs of the new deal...frankly i am weary of the whores, their pontificating, their condescension, and their smug self-righteousness...i vote but these lame bastards do not represent me...the system is vile, corrupt, skewed towards wealth, and deserves to die in a lake of fire fueled by the reams of legislation these creeps use to dissemble about their motives for doing what they do...complicating an already convoluted causality in an effort to take no responsibility for their actions and their impact on the people they purport to represent..."the people's business" has always been a foul cesspit of lies and distortion designed to shift wealth in an upward direction and legalize various forms of extortion...there has never really been an expression of populist rage that wasn't co-opted by some wing of the elite for their own ends... ( how many sharecroppers and dirt farmers from tennesee, alabama, and virginia who never owned a slave were sucked into the "sacred cause " of the confederacy and states rights by the rhetoric of the plantation elite as they endeavored to preserve their position of economic superiority in the southern tier of states? the people's will is never truly expressed, it is simply modified and fed back as a rationalization for unpalatable acts... elites are scum. ) yes most people are unhappy about tax increases ( and the poorer you are in fiscal terms the more of your income, proportionally, you pay in taxes...period) but one has to wonder how the people will feel as social services evaporate and wealth gets to keep more...a distortion of an anti tax stance that purports to represent the will of the people but serves to aggrandize wealth at the people's expense ( what cash is left in the pipeline will go to wealth ... banks "too big to fail" and politically powerful industries will still be subsidized...it is the way of things )...it may be time to call a halt to the hamiltonian third republic by refusing to recognize the politicians everywhere as nothing more than the manipulative slime they are....fuck these people.

negative feedback loop

"if you're looking for one overarching explanation for the still terrible job market, it is this great consumer bust. business executives are only rational to hold back on hiring if they do not know when their customers will fully return. consumers, for their part, are coping with a sharp loss of wealth and an uncertain future ( and many have discovered that they don't need to buy a new car or stove every few years). both consumers and executives are easily frightened by the latest economic problem, be it rising gas prices or the debt-ceiling impasse...the old consumer economy is gone and it is not coming back...if governments stop spending at the same time consumers do the economy can enter a vicious cycle as it did in hoover's day. the prospect of that cycle is one reason an impasse on the debt ceiling , and a governemnt default , could do so much damage."
n y times 7-17-2011


causality rarely supports "one overarching explanation" for anything...there are too many variables to account for in something so large and interconnected in so many unseen ways as the economy...i was never a big user of credit and i never used my home equity as an atm...i enter into cycles of debt only when absolutely necessary and i stay out of stores and banks...buy used books for school and for research...don't have cable or satellite tv or an i-pad or a smart phone...all of which marks me out as a very conservative spender... ( some would call it fucking cheap...but i am a child of children of the depression who preached "make do" and never really trusted the powers that be to be truthful...the appear to have been correct)...we are all more complex than we seem at first glance...glad to see so many coming around to my point of view...then again i miss the wasteland and my one concession to post-modernism's claptrap about defining things by what they are not...i have been on about smaller, more local economies for some time ( as the two or three of you who actually read this already know ) that is an idea whose time has come even if "the market" still believes in growth...i don't...in a finite world all true economies are a zero sum game...you cannot get more out of them that you put in...the rest is simply ponzi schemes that seemed real because of the two hundred year bubble of cheap fossil fuel...that is as dead as consumerism ( hence the reference in the time to rising gas prices...don't look for that to sustain any sort of long-term downward trend...ever. )..if you want to get grounded in the basis for this argument here's a short reading list .

powerdown, peak everything, and the end of growth by richard heinberg.

eaarth and deep economy by bill mickibben.

fleeing vesuvius edited by gillian fallon and richard dowthwaite ( it has a couple of articles by dimitry orlov who is a complete ass )

the post-carbon reader

and on the extremist end

the long emergency by james howard kunstler

endgame vols. 1 & 2 by derrick jensen

radical simplicity by jim merkle

it's entertaining to watch the stock market stutter and lurch ( yes i know i have a 401k) and listen to the bullshit posturing that comes out of the federal reserve, the treasury, the national bagnio, the oval orifice, and from business and economic departments at major universities around the country...all smoke and mirrors...policy is bankrupt and so is the government...have along hard look at greece and start brushing up your mandarin ( but don't use up too much time on it...the chinese run at the top is going to be a short one...you'll only need it for a decade, tops.) the governor of maryland says the republicans are playing politics with the debt-ceiling to undercut obamaland's chances at a second term...no shit sherlock...but then you are a member of the fraternity of the only real whores there are...you should understand these things.

how many economists does it take to ...

"a dismal june employment report shows that employers are adding nowhere near as many jobs as they normally do this long after a recession has ended. unemployment has climbed for three straight months and is now at 9.2 percent. there is no precedent, in data going back to 1948, for such a high rate two years into what economists say is a recovery. the excruciatingly slow growth is confounding economists..."

associated press 7-9-2011

one would think that the "science" of economics would be as discredited as alchemy and its practitioners as outdated as the local barber bleeding bad humors as a cure for anything...such is the hold on the popular imagination of a three piece suit that any lunkhead at a university can put one on and be regarded as knowledgeable about matters in the real world...which is not to say that folks at universities are all lunkheads....only that education and a title are not proofs against stupidity or a disconnection from reality...word out here on the street is that the recession has never come to an end and the pronouncements of certain segments of the intelligentsia based on bogus numbers and books cooked from political considerations are met with derision and, usually, contempt...unemployment would be at least 18.4 percent if the lying scum at the department of labor didn't cook their books by discounting the poor souls who have flat given up on ever working at a "real" job again...the fed has interest rates at near 0%, the deficit is up to an unreal amount, and the whores are playing politics to disguise the fact that policy options have run out and the shit is about to hit he fan...i annoy some people when i talk about smaller and more local economies and voice a healthy disrespect for "the market", capitalism, industrial agriculture, corporate personhood, and the merits of "growth" as a mechanism for anything beyond the aggrandizement of the avarice of a select minority of low-life scum at the top of the institutional ponzi scheme embodied by the hamiltonian third republic...oh well...everything old is new again...check out " The Limits to Growth" from 1970 and "The End of Growth" by richard heinberg that was published this year.

explanations ?

"yet it didn't make sense. who would want to play such elaborate jokes? what for? who could have know that we'd discover the arrow and take such a deep interest in it? no- this concurrence, however small, between the stick on the thread and the sparrow on the wire- was pure chance. granted, a stick on a thread, one doesn't see this every day...yet the stick could have been hanging there for a thousand reasons unrelated to the sparrow, we had exaggerated its importance because it turned up at the end point of our search, as its outcome- when, in fact, it wasn't any outcome at all, it was just a stick hanging on a thread. pure chance then? indeed...and yet one could see in this series of events a propensity for congruity, something hazily linking them together...something was trying to break through and press toward meaning..."

from "Cosmos" by witold gombrowicz

the Jehovah's witnesses were touring the neighborhood this morning...bringing truth and meaning door to door for those of us too damned lazy to go out an look for it ourselves...everything explained...all the answers right there in a small tract if i could only get past my sorry-assed skepticism and embrace the true love of the son of god...so we stood there feeling sorry for each other for a few moments before i closed the door authoritatively...and we both shook our heads as we walked away...that poor sod on the way to his next rejection and me to look for witold's magnum opus on the human need to find an explanation for everything even if the events that need to be explained are only tenuously related and the explanation has to stretch credulity to the breaking point...religion...science...the congressional record...taro cards...telephone psychics...campaign rhetoric...philosophy...conspiracy theories...alien abductions...all grounded in human inability to accept that there may indeed be a touch of pure random chance in the universe...there must be a reason for everything and that need for an explanation bogs life down in situations that are well beyond complicated at times...life is not linear and causality is a bitch...you cannot know all the consequences of your actions and people will always fall for a good line of bullshit because they need to believe...there must be some kind of evolutionary advantage in this...but i'll be damned if i can figure it out

a more perfect union

"in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controuls (hume's spelling) of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave; and to have no other end in all his actions, but private interest. by this interest, we must govern him, and by means of it, make him co-operate to public good, nonwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition."
david hume quoted by alexander hamilton in volume one of his collected papers p 94-95.

"viewing the subject on its merits alone, the freeholders of the country would be the safest depositories of republican liberty. in future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but any sort of other property. these will either combine under the influence of their common situation; in which case, the rights of property and the public liberty will not be secure in their hands,or, which is more probable. they will become the tools of opulence and ambition; in which case there will be equal danger on another side."
james madison

"the people who are the insurgents [shaysites] have never paid any, or little taxes-but they see the weakness of government; they feel at once their own poverty compared with the opulent, and their own force, and they are determined to make use of the latter, in order to remedy the former. their creed is ' that the property of the united states has been protected from the confiscation of britan by the joint exertion of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all. and he that attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy to equity and ought to be swept form off the face of the earth. in a word they are determined to annihilate all debts, public and private and have agrarian laws, which are easily effected by means of unfunded paper money which shall be a tender in all cases."
general knox in a letter to george washington.


"the tyranny of philadelphia is little different than the tyranny of george III."
patrick henry

"every man of reflection must see that the change now proposed is a transfer of power from the many to the few."
richard henry lee

"the constitution is calculated to increase the influence, power, and wealth of those who have it already. its ratification would be a grand point gained in favor of the aristocratic party."
john quincy adams

that the founding fathers were enamored of the gasbags of the scottish enlightenment goes without saying. they were clearly suffering form a siege mentality and a fear of the mob. the demos ( a greek word loosely translated as mob..at least by political scientists and crypto-fascist fox pundits...not the democrats..a root word for democracy) would either become pawns of duplicitous and unscrupulous wealth, harking back to ancient rome and julius caesar's use of the populares to undermine the power of the patrician class, or, even worse, take jeffersoinian rhetoric to heart and demand an actual say in their political and economic well-being , becoming that "interested and overbearing majority" that so haunted madison in federalist X. the founders portrayed themselves as eminently scrupulous and as having only the best intentions for their less intellectually endowed countrymen...benevolent oligarchs of political wisdom. the inclusiveness of the declaration of indepedence's "life , liberty, and pursuit of happiness" was transmuted into the constitution's "more perfect union" after shays' rebellion and its aftermath scared the pants of hamilton and company...that the anti-federalists have disappeared from the popular narrative of the founding of the first republic is less apparent but just as true...they clearly saw the power grab behind the new formulation for a national government...perhaps their insistence on decentralization coupled with the increasingly weighty albatross of slavery prevented a more concentrated resistance in 1789 and the issue was left to fester until 1860 when the constitution was enshrined as inviolate in the second republic...( edwin drake's activities in 1859 may yet be seen as a more pivotal event in sowing the seeds for future trouble in the smooth governance of empire...the jury is still out...mostly because the faction deepest in denial are the direct heirs and beneficiaries of the system implemented in 1789...like all contemporary political [read economic] debate there is a lot of bad noise hovering around these issues...actual events will obviate the debate and will define parameters of real action...the rest is manipulation for a position of advantage)...that was the supposed resolution of the conflict...but there is successionist talk abroad in the land again as the bankruptcy of the hamiltoniam scheme becomes more apparent and the anger of the have-nots is channeled into political gain for "the opulent"